Information Maven: Greg Meyer

A friend recently sent me information from James Surowiecki’s excellent book the Wisdom of Crowds, and suggested a test for the book - name a few locations for your friends, and ask them individually to respond with the time of day and place they would meet if the only thing you knew about the meeting was that it would occur on a particular day and a particular place.

The answers may surprise you … or they may not. Surowiecki’s thesis is that the larger the market, the more accurate the information. If you ask 100,000 people this question, you’re likely to get a lot of them in the same place at the same time on the same day. It’s a more interesting question, I think, if you try to solve a problem like “how to motivate yourself” or “how can I make my job more fulfilling” with this method.

In that spirit, here’s some interesting stuff I found today:

• Seth Godin writes about tweaking, which he describes as the art of fixing stuff so it just works better
• My version of a “tweaking” guru for work and networking is Guy Kawasaki. Guy writes about a networking tool to visually map venture capital networks
• And in the spirit of silliness, Poaching a salmon in your dishwasher